Pierre Auger Observatory

The image above, which appeared in Science in an article on Auger by Adrien Cho, was made by us.

The Pierre Auger Observatory in
Malargue, Argentina, is a multinational collaboration of
physicists trying to detect powerful cosmic rays from outer
space. The energy of the particles here is above 1019eV,
or over a million times more powerful than the most energetic
particles in any human-made accelerator. No-one knows where these rays
come from.

Such cosmic rays are very rare, hitting an area the size of a
football field once every 10 000 years. This means you need an enormous 'net' to catch these mysterious ultra high energy particles. The Auger project will have, when completed, about 1600
detectors.

Each detector is a tank, like the one pictured above, and will be
filled with 11 000 liters / 3000 gallons of pure water and sit about
1.5 km away from the next tank. This array on the Argentinian Pampas
will cover an area of about 3000 km2 which is about the size of the
state of Rhode Island or ten times the size of Paris. A second
detection system sits on hills overlooking the Pampas and on dark
nights captures a faint light or fluorescence caused by the shower
particles colliding with the atmosphere.

Shown above is the shower created when a
proton with energy 1019eV hits the atmosphere. (Color
codes: muons, photons, electrons/positrons)
Also shown is the array of 1600 tanks (size greatly exaggerated)
superimposed over their actual location in Malargue (left) and over
the same size area (100km x 100km) around Chicago, IL & southern Lake
Michigan. For the record, this picture was used in Astronomy magazine's September 2005 article "Cosmic Rays radiate Radio Waves" by Liz Kruesi. It is also used on the Pierre Auger (Argentina) page.

Downloads

3d Models

These are animated 3d models of showers that you can move around and
play with on Windows/*nix as long as the graphics cards are good
enough (which is the case for most post-2002 machines).
It also works in stereo on GeoWalls.
Mac versions are untested.

Instructions
on how to move the models displayed by Partiview (the viewer we use).

proton19_75deg.zip (18 Mb) :
the interactive animated 3d model used to make the animations below. The zip file also contains this documentation on how
to run and use it. Windows users can click on shower.exe or shower.bat; the former has a more user-friendly interface made using a Director plugin made by Toshiyuki Takahei.

Movies

malargues_prot19ev_notanks_transp.mpeg (27Mb) : Simple animation around a 19eV proton shower over Malargues in Argentina. Tanks are not shown. Resolution is 720 x 576. Made for a documentary (which is why it ends up in water). Variations with tanks: hi-res (29Mb), lo-res (3Mb)

proton19ev_cosmus.mpeg (6Mb) : A simple movie of this shower hitting Malargue and then Chicago. Resolution is 800 x 600. Best played at 15 fps.

10 second .avi movies -- lo-res (5Mb), hi-res
(20Mb) -- of the tank from different angles.
3d model in Blender used to make the movies.

Stereo Photographs

Stereo Photographs of the tanks and fluorescence detectors from the Observatory in Argentina by Randy Landsberg.

Usage

The visualizations and model data on this site are free and released
under Creative
Commons License 2.5. This means you can make derivative works of
it, distribute it in any way you work, for both commercial and
non-commercial work - as long as you give credit to us and to Sergio
Sciutto for AIRES, the
simulation package that generated the shower data.

Partiview, the
software that actually displays the data and whose binary is included
in the zip file conttaining each model, is released under its own (different but similarly friendly) license.

Credits

The shower simulations were done using Sergio Sciutto's huge and well-documented AIRES package.

The Auger scientists consulted in making this were Maximo Ave,
Paolo Privitera, and Enrique Zas, all at the University of Chicago at the time.

Thanks to Beatriz Garcia of Auger for providing a picture of
the Malargue site. And to Microsoft's Terraserver for the
picture of the area around Lake Michigan.

The primary software used in making the visualizations was Partiview by Stuart Levy
(NCSA/UIUC). Other software used: Blender, Pokescope, Wallview, and
Director. Thanks also go to Toshiyuki Takahei (RIKEN) for plugging
Partiview into Director.